Exploding Knots

Musings of a Simple Country Man

By Hobie Morris

(Brookfield, NY – March 2015) An old Brookfield farmer once shared with us a winter weather maxim that has been especially true this year:  “when the days lengthen, the cold strengthens.”

You know it’s been very cold when the knots in old hemlock boards begin popping like champagne bottle corks on New Year’s Eve.  Forest trees around our secluded home have been creaking, cracking and groaning in the cold, like a severely arthritic person trying to rise from a chair.

Record breaking cold has temporarily put Central New Yorkers in a deep body and mental freeze as we hunker down like a hibernating black bear to patiently await the inevitable warming reprieve.

For this simple country man and his beautiful, indomitable and extremely hardy Lois the last several months have been, in many ways, the ruggedest and coldest in our 35 years of living off the grid.

The well known Brookfield winters are always challenging and endless.  Its hills and highland valleys have earned a well deserved reputation for being semi-Arctic for both cold and snow severity, but this climate has produced very rugged  and determined people who have a survivor’s mentality no matter what curve balls life throws at them.

A Jewish proverb states that two things are needed in winter—fire and stories.  Fire, of course, to warm the body and stories to warm the heart.  Our off the grid living for 35 years contains a book full of yearly challenges, including in the winter mountains of snow, incessant hand shoveling, ushering in firewood from numerous piles to well used wood stoves.   We have no bulbs, lights, wires, thermostats, running water or plumbing of any kind.  All these things have to be provided by other means, including dipping water from a shallow spring that bubbles up from Mother Earth.  On extremely cold days the water is far warmer than the air above it.   It’s not a life style embraced by many.

While it is often a solitary life, it is also a quiet and peaceful one, especially in the winter.  While we work hard, we enjoy Mother Nature hard, too.

This simple country man and his amazing wife Lois enjoy telling people that on cold mornings we put food on our pantry floor into our small propane refrigerator to keep items from freezing.  With tongue in cheek I’ll tell about Lois’ voice coming to me as I worked in the woods in June.  She called me to lunch in February and her call didn’t thaw even though it was still in the air until the first warm day in June. Another time, when we drove into Brookfield, we saw the wood fire smoke like a white pencil in the air.   A man had put up a long ladder against it because it was frozen and he was chopping it down so additional smoke could come out into the Arctic air.  An old-timer said one especially cold year candle flames froze and were broken off,stored  and used to light fires later on.

While I can’t verify its accuracy, I’ve heard tell that a blind horse once froze to death here in Brookfield in late July.  It was so hot that a barn full of corn began popping.  The horse near the barn felt the popcorn fall all around him and thought it was a snow storm.  He started shivering, lay down in what he thought was snow, and the poor horse passed away.

Come July, there will be a lot of old hemlock boards around Brookfield without knots.  It’s been that kind of a winter.

Hobie Morris is a Brookfield resident and simple country man.